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Month: January 2021

Published on 11 Comments on Raw Data: Poverty in the US

NOTE: I copied this post over from my MoJo blog. How do you like the new chart bug?

Sometimes raw data can point you in two different directions at once. Take poverty, for example. CBPP has the details here, but the basic story is that over the past half century we've spent a lot of money on social welfare benefits for the poor and it's made a big difference:

Social welfare programs have cut the poverty rate nearly in half, and that's true across the board. It's true for children, for the elderly, and for the working-age population.

On the other hand, if you look at a consistent definition of poverty among our peer countries, things don't look so good:

Both of these charts are true. There's nothing sneaky about either one. But taken together, do they mean we've done pretty well addressing poverty? Or that we've done disgracefully badly? It's your call.

Published on 52 Comments on Yet More About Comments

The feedback from the previous post is pretty clearly on the side of requiring registration. However, there was also a lot of love for Disqus. So here's a second question: Should I install Disqus or stick with the stock WordPress commenting system?

UPDATE: For now, the consensus seems to be FOR registration but SPLIT on Disqus. So I've turned on registration but I'm keeping the stock WordPress comments for now. We'll see how it goes.

UPDATE 2: As for the orange text in the comment box, I have no idea what's causing that. Like everything related to WordPress, there's an easy fix for this but only if you know which CSS variable controls it. There's no simple way of looking this up (that I know of) and I finally got sick of chasing around trying to figure it out for yet another minor appearance change. If anyone happens to know, tell me in comments and I'll change it.

UPDATE 3: Let me be clear: If you know which variable to change, let me know. If you just have a guess, please don't bother. I'm already pretty familiar with the WordPress guessing game.

Published on 196 Comments on Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog. After four years at the Washington Monthly and 12 years at Mother Jones, I've decided to go full circle and return to blogging at my own site. This gives me a little more freedom to post when I want and a little more freedom to say what I want without worrying about how it might reflect on others.

Aside from that, things will be pretty much the same as always. I mostly blog about policy—I call it "policy lite"—but also about anything else that catches my eye. As always, there are lots of charts and, every Friday, plenty of cats. So settle in and enjoy.

Published on 1 Comment on Chart of the Day: Why Is COVID-19 Worse In Some Parts of the World and Better in Others?

Here is something tentative but genuinely fascinating. I promise the payoff is worth it, but first it's going to require a little bit of background about how the immune system works.

Human cells all contain proteins called human leukocyte antigens, or HLAs, which swim around and periodically latch on to invading viruses, which they bring to the surface of the cell. White blood cells, patrolling outside the cells, are always looking for stuff that doesn't belong, and if an HLA presents an invader to the surface of the cell white blood cells immediately attack and destroy the entire cell. Conversely, if no HLA brings a virus to the surface, then its existence goes undetected and the immune system can't attack it.

Now here's the interesting part: there are dozens of different kinds of HLAs, and everybody has a different HLA profile. That's one reason that if you and I both get sneezed on by someone with a cold, one of us might get sick while the other doesn't. It means that one of us happened to have the right HLA to latch onto the virus while the other one didn't.

And here's the even more interesting part: different human populations have different average HLA profiles. This means that some populations are more resistant to certain diseases than others. For example, COVID-19.

In a recent paper, a team of researchers looked at 140 different HLAs, and in particular discovered that COVID-19 seemed to be sensitive to the ratio of the S and N types. Here's the chart:

One of the great mysteries of COVID-19 is why China has been relatively unscathed. Aside from the initial outbreak in Wuhan, there have been hardly any cases in the entire country. But how can that be? Even with strong quarantine procedures, it's simply not plausible that a fairly transmissible virus like COVID-19 could fail to spread widely in a country of over a billion people.

HLAs might be the answer. As you can see in the chart, the authors estimate that the S/N ratio for China is about 5.7, one of the highest in the world. That would suggest high resistance to the COVID-19 virus. At the other end, Sweden has an S/N ratio of 3.8, one of the lowest in the world. It's possible that the "Swedish experiment" was never an experiment at all. They might have been doomed to a high COVID-19 infection rate no matter what they had done.

This is very preliminary research, and HLA profiles are certainly not the entire story. That said, if this is confirmed—or if other HLA profiles are identified that are associated with COVID-19—it might change our understanding of why infection rates are very different in different parts of the world.

Published on

Seth Rich is one of the best examples of how Fox News doesn’t operate as a legitimate news outlet. Rich, as you might recall, was a DNC staff member who was killed in the early morning in Washington DC, probably as the result of a botched robbery, and that’s how every other news outlet reported it. But not Fox. They insisted on peddling an insane conspiracy theory that Rich had leaked DNC emails and been targeted for murder because of that. The Rich family finally got tired of the lies and sued, but just before Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs were about to testify in the case, Fox settled for millions of dollars.

This is all sleazy enough, but Ben Smith reports that there’s more:

There was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement had to be kept secret for a month — until after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed.

Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement secret for the final month of the Trump re-election campaign? Why was it important to the company, which calls itself a news organization, that one of the biggest lies of the Trump era remain unresolved for that period? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was wrong would incite the president’s wrath? Did network executives fear backlash from their increasingly radicalized audience, which has been gravitating to other conservative outlets?

The unusual arrangement underscores how deeply entwined Fox has become in the Trump camp’s disinformation efforts and the dangerous paranoia they set off, culminating in the fatal attack on the Capitol 11 days ago. The network parroted lies from Trump and his more sinister allies for years, ultimately amplifying the president’s enormous deceptions about the election’s outcome, further radicalizing many of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Smith goes on to say that members of the legitimate media have been beating themselves up over minor aspects of their reporting while ignoring the elephant in the room: Fox News.

As we in the media reckon with our role in the present catastrophe, Fox often gets left out of the story. You can see why. Dog bites man is never news. Fox’s vitriol and distortions are simply viewed as part of the landscape now.

….And so let me take a break from beating up well-intentioned journalists and even the social media platforms that greedily threw open Pandora’s box for profit. There’s only one multibillion-dollar media corporation that deliberately and aggressively propagated these untruths. That’s the Fox Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch; his feckless son Lachlan, who is nominally C.E.O.; and the chief legal officer Viet Dinh, a kind of regent who mostly runs the company day-to-day.

Fox News—not social media, not think tanks—is the primal source of racism, xenophobia, polarization, and reckless lying in American media. Until we somehow put a stop to this, it will be hard to ever recover the country we used to have. Not a perfect country by any stretch, but at least one where we all had a roughly similar idea of what was true and were willing to talk openly about it. Rupert Murdoch has earned billions of dollars for destroying American politics, and he’ll keep doing it until the money hose goes away. Let’s start turning it off.

Published on

Check this out:

The incoming administration is embracing some of California’s most pioneering initiatives, such as programs for rapidly decarbonizing the electricity grid and tuition-free college, as well as more obscure, incremental policies. Also on the new White House agenda will be measures to ban mandatory arbitration clauses in employee contracts and a revival of a “Cash for Clunkers” program aimed at providing incentives to get polluting cars off the road — signature California policies.

Cash for Clunkers! My favorite stimulus program of all time. Sure, I agree with the experts who say that it’s not all that great purely as stimulus, but as a way of making stimulus popular it couldn’t be beat. More like this, please.